


Jamais deux sans trois

by cicak



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Babies, Canon Lesbian Relationship, F/F, Fairy Tale Elements, Less missing scene but more missing entire relationship, Missing Scene, Revenge Queens, Same-Sex Marriage, the best revenge is living well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-09 00:11:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5518211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The best revenge is living well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jamais deux sans trois

**Author's Note:**

> Mintyfreckles wanted: Margot/Alana.. I love watching them as a very powerful couple, the ones who rule, the queens. Happy Holidays! I hope this satisfies <3

There are distinct moments in Alana Bloom’s life where she lies awake at night gripped with panic about just how much her life has changed. It is crazy that you can one day be a mid thirties professional in a relationship with a charming older man who you think worships you, be exactly where you want with your career - a thriving private practice, a great publication history, fast track to tenure at one of the best universities in the country and all the trappings of a successful woman, beautiful house, nice car, lovely shoes, perfect dresses, and next severely injured, looking at a lifetime of pain and disability, with your reputation shattered, now best known as the moll of the most notorious serial killer in living memory, and having to rebuild your life alongside your shattered pelvis. For most people, the story would end there, but Alana’s world has always moved in threes, and now she has found herself in a soap opera drama between two warring siblings, your ex, his...whatever Will Graham was, fighting for freedom and revenge, and then realising you are in love with a woman, then agree to have her baby so that you can both inherit a fortune out of a fairy tale.

There was also the deal that she made with the devil itself, so much like the deals made in fairy tales. Hannibal would someday come for her, and by extension her first born, her nascent family, and she would have to outwit him and spin straw into gold in order to escape.

 

There were a lot of nights where Alana couldn’t sleep.

 

* * *

 

It had been a long time since Alana did her OBGYN rotation as a resident, but if she knows one thing from all the late night reading of lesbian websites she’s been doing, it’s that sperm has to be frozen pretty quickly after harvesting. Problem is, she and Margot need to get out of Muskrat Farms as quickly as possible, and hotels are usually not equipped with a freezer, certainly not one that can go more than below ice cream levels.

 

They go to Alana’s house, despite it probably being the most dangerous place for them to go if Mason’s mooks are looking for them, and stash Mason’s sperm inside a half empty box of frozen pork chops. They’re Muskrat Farms brand, obviously, because there is nothing that doesn’t have a tinge of drama.

 

Margot is pacing in Alana’s living room, keeping moving so as to stay awake. They are both on a serious comedown from the adrenaline, and there is nothing that Alana wants more than to take her in her arms and drag her back to her beautiful bed and give into the physical need to be close to someone. Even as word gets out that Mason is dead, there’s a buzz under both of their skins and a flutter of anxiety in Alana’s breast that this whole thing is not over yet. However much Margot is floating on cloud nine having killed her horrible beast of a brother, Alana loves her, loves her more than she feels capable to hold onto, and even if they don’t get the Verger baby, and even if they don’t get the Verger fortune, even if Margot stops being a Verger in anything but name and her enormous sense of entitlement, she hopes that this will be, if not forever, long enough, for them to make it through.

 

There’s so much unspoken between them, but yet Alana knows that they have a bond that is stronger than anything she had ever felt before. They are fire-forged, a the strongest alloy of allies, and yet the quotidian erosion of normal life may be the thing that undoes them. The baby is Margot’s, it is her legacy, her ticket, her everything, and yet still only an idea.

 

* * *

 

No one goes to the gynecologist expecting a spa treatment, but Alana feels gutted when her usual gynae politely refuses a referral to a specialist after she hears their plan, shaking her head that they should consider a plan b, a more reliable donor, a plan for more than one attempt at IVF - that you cannot expect any gynaecologist in the country to make the kind of promises they want made. The first fertility specialist they find independently refers them on within ten minutes of hearing their spiel, spooked partly by Margot’s intensity and partly by the way their greasy lawyer perspired heavily every time someone mentioned the word ‘uterus’. They ditch the lawyer, and Margot takes to meditating,  and they ended up skipping from fertility specialist to fertility specialist in a flurry of red-eye flights and bad coffee until they met Doctor Matthews, a highly charismatic and vaguely unethical fertility specialist in Beverly Hills, a man who rubbed his hands both at the challenge of knocking up a woman in her late 30s in just one shot and the promised bonus that Margot slipped under the table.

 

While Alana feels a slight hippocratic twinge, Margot never promised to be ethical.

 

They sit there and hold hands as the doctor talks about all the difficulties. They’ve heard it before. The money is dwindling. Alana’s lucky shoes need reheeling, the stiletto worn almost down to the nail, the red sole scratched and worn.

This has to work, Margot tells the doctor. So tell me what we need to do.

 

Fertility drugs are horrible, every time Alana goes into the freezer she sees the now empty box of pork chops and feels sick that perhaps, despite all she knows about genetics, that the baby she would soon be carrying would carry more than the large eyes and weak chin of the Verger clan, that the cruelty that infested Mason was not just beaten and ground into him from childhood, but something innate, something in the DNA.

 

After all, when Hannibal was exposed she dreamed that she was poisoned by him, she was terrified that there was something wrong with her to not have known. Her recovery was difficult however well her bones healed, however well the surgeries went, however miraculous her recovery from a shattered pelvis and a broken heart went. She still worries, even now, that she came back wrong, somehow.

  


* * *

 

Margot takes to controlling Muskrat Farms and its subsidiaries with an iron fist, moving to eradicate her brother’s legacy in a flurry of practical changes and elaborate PR spin. She throws herself into making the farms modern, profitable and ethical with the same kind of fervour she used to throw herself at the new collections, at killing her brother, or at Alana’s uterus.

The embryo is implanted by Doctor Matthews in early March, and Alana spends that night sitting on the couch with her legs raised, watching the full moon rise and praying that this will work.

 

Spring arrives after a winter that had dragged on for years and makes up for lost time in exploding into colour. Alana feels a stirring in her soul when she sees the first green shoots in their garden, the call of the spring birds, and then immense peace when she looks down at the seventeenth cheap plastic pregnancy test since they Doctor Matthews left and sees two pale blue lines.

 

She yells something, possibly just noise, and blinks rapidly, her eyes filling with tears. Her walking stick clatters to the floor and Margot comes running, and then screams with excitement herself when she sees Alana clutching the pregnancy test. Alana’s wobbly legs take her to the floor, clutching at the sink, then at Margot, as they both grin like maniacs at each other.

 

When Doctor Matthews confirms it with blood tests that she is two weeks pregnant, that it worked, and that the embryo implanted properly she feels this weird rush of relief that she can finally breathe out.

 

Alana is working in the therapeutic wing at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane these days, mostly to keep her qualifications in date and not to have more than a few years lapse in her clinical experience. Strangely, all the paranoid schizophrenics and the weird, broken murderers who used to taunt her and spit disgusting epithets in her direction respond well to her pregnant silhouette. Her boss, the ancient venerable psychiatrist the state tempted out of retirement to replace Chilton, congratulates her on her great progress with men they had always considered to be untreatable. He hints that he wants to get back to his garden and his grandchildren, and that she should think about applying for the chief of medicine role once he is ready to hand it over.

Alana promises to think about it, but it is strange to be pregnant, and the strangeness of her new life takes up a lot of her time. The growth of the baby, the impact on her moods and desires, how much she throbs with sexual energy some days and on others cannot stop crying when Margot reaches to touch her. It is stranger still to be pregnant while your ex boyfriend, the man you had thought would be the father of any children you had, is on trial for murder, including the murder of the man who’s baby you are actually carrying.

 

It takes a very long time for Hannibal to come to trial. The delay is put down to how many of Hannibal’s defence team quit, and the one he ends up with is widely considered by the press to be the world’s greatest scumbag. By the time Hannibal’s trial date is announced, Alana is heavily pregnant. She can’t see her feet, and is unsteady even on her cane, her center of gravity skewed dramatically, the pressure on her fragile pelvis agony. She should be on bedrest - in fact Doctor Matthews had flown out and put the fear of god into Margot until she was on his side. By the time the prosecutors call her, she is almost too pregnant to leave the house, confined to a wheelchair when she needs to get around.

 

She requests to testify behind a screen, not because she is so frail, but because she does not want him to see her belly, her chic maternity outfits cut to emphasise the slenderness of the rest of her rather than disguise her son’s growth. She hates that he is in the room, and hates that when she steps out after giving her damning testimony she catches his eye through the gap between the screen and the door. He smiles at her like a snake, and she feels the twinge in her hips strongly as she steps down from the podium.

  


* * *

 

Margot favours strange names for their son that she digs out of obscure books or off the more esoteric parts of the internet. She wants Alana to be in his name, and so she gravitates to names that have some kind of floral meaning, which are rarer for boys. She refuses to budge once she discovers the name of the Aztec god of love, flowers, song and games, the son of flowers. The baby will have the last name Verger of course, the lawyers were firm on that, and Alana hates the idea of naming her son Bloom, or worse, Alan. Alana favours biblical names, names that her son can grow into rather than around, trained into shape like a vine in a garden.

 

Her son is born early in the morning on Christmas day, weighing eight pounds on the nose, pink and healthy and with a head of thick black hair. They name him Daniel Joshua Xochipilli Verger, and the lawyers are there to witness Mason Verger’s name being written on the birth certificate.

 

They return home a few days later, Daniel packed into his car seat, tiny and fragile and so alive, to two pieces of mail, a certified letter from the lawyers stating that the money will be released to them in 48 hours, and a handwritten note stamped with a hundred different prison hallmarks from Hannibal Lecter, congratulating them on the birth of their son.

 

* * *

 

Lecter is found guilty in one of the quickest jury decisions in history, and then messy work of his sentencing starts. There is a lot of judicial arguing, the death penalty goes on and off the table, each time Alana’s heart jumps into her throat that maybe, just maybe, they can be set free by the machinations of the state. Daniel is beautiful and perfect, and she is terrified every time she hears Hannibal Lecter’s name on the television. She dreams inbetween feeds that Hannibal is lurking in the shadows, that he is the pediatrician, that somehow the courts give him custody.

 

When it’s announced that Lecter will not be getting the death penalty, Frederick Chilton comes to their house with a proposition and, for once, they are both too exhausted to tell him to leave, and instead take solace that Daniel is at the phase where he throws anything he can get his hand on. Chilton leaves with mashed potatoes on his suit, peas in his hair, and peanut butter in his coat pockets, though the last is more Margot’s doing than Daniel’s.

 

Chilton was always odious, but now he is rich and odious. His book about Hannibal is so full of flaws and fictions that Alana burns it on the balcony when she finishes reading it. She came out of it pretty well, most of Chilton’s petty ire focused on Will Graham and the FBI, and all the way through it Hannibal is portrayed as singularly crazy, a unique specimen of mental illnesses that is too fascinating and important to science to be allowed to be killed by lethal injection.

The head of medicine at BSHCI has announced he is retiring in the new year, and Chilton is convinced he can dupe the entire world that Hannibal Lecter is criminally insane and should be treated with compassion, and instead of what the judge favours, which is locking him up and throwing away the key. He has been lobbying to the state that should put him into the care of those who know him best, who can give him the familiar surroundings and rehabilitate him for the good of the world, and who better than his very much moved-on former lover to be in charge of his new kingdom? He is so much less likely to be murdered in a dedicated mental hospital than in general population of some nasty for profit prison, of course. It is only humane for them to do this.

 

Alana does eventually get round to throwing Chilton out of their house, as is customary, but his words do echo in her mind, their seductive lilt of revenge, the idea that she could be in control of Hannibal Lecter, that maybe, she could get back what he took from her.

 

* * *

 

Alana had been keeping an idle eye on the gay marriage decisions as they swept across the country. It hadn’t been something that affected her and her friends too much, Maryland had been performing same sex marriages for a few years by the time most of her friends started to marry, but being so close to the Virginia state line and to DC, plus the generally hostile feeling that they still came up against, especially in Margot's line of work, Alana had never really put more than a few hours of idle speculation into it. Their bond defied petty state legislators and the threat of eternal damnation, of a god neither of them believed in hating them. They had a child, a house, a pork-products empire and a murder covenant. 

 

It was the first nice day after Daniel turned one, cold but sunny with that perfect mid-winter light that makes everything feel fresh and new. Daniel was in his pram, and they were off downtown to meet an old friend from the university. Parking that day was terrible, some kind of flash sale meant that all of the spots near the cafe were taken, and so they needed to walk further than normal, which took them through the antiques district.

Alana had always associated that street with Hannibal and his eclectic tastes, and had not dared go near there since everything happened, but she was running late and the sidewalks were wider there to allow the stroller through, and so she resolved to put her head down and rush through without letting the intrusive thoughts into her head.

Maybe it was meant to be, or maybe just that winter light, but something still managed to catch her eye, and she stopped. In the window was a ring, an ostentatious, enormous diamond of such great quality and sparkle you couldn’t help but look at it. The thick band was masculine without being cheap, like a patriarch's signet ring, but it was still an engagement ring, but more so. It was a ring you could intimidate people with. It was a ring fit for a queen, but not a sweet and retiring consort in place to carry on the line, but a warrior queen, someone who could fight for her country and still look good doing it. 

Alana was consumed with the vision of Margot wearing it when battling with suppliers, facing down her competitors, winning another business award, taking over the world, all the things Margot did currently without the ring, but once she saw it, she couldn't imagine Margot without it.

She managed to make it to coffee in time, slightly out of breath, the ring weighing heavy in her coat pocket.

The proposal was simple. Alana could get down on one knee if she really tried, but getting back up again would never be smooth enough. Instead, when Margot got home, tense and tired from being away inspecting her empire for a few days, Alana handed her Daniel, who cooed and babbled, almost at the point of making words now, a lone front tooth making him look even more adorable than usual, and then when Alana took Daniel back for feeding, handed her the box so smoothly Margot didn’t even know what she was holding for almost a complete minute.

Margot opened the box, and there, in the kitchen, their son balanced on her hip, Alana asked the question, feeling an echo of her former confidence ebb back, already knowing the answer.

 

They married simply, well, simply for a Verger wedding, in city hall, both in white dresses, Daniel trusted to hold onto the rings for just long enough for a picture before he threw them, laughing into some far flung corner. Margot looked radiant, perfect, and so happy she could burst, their son kept laughing like a loon while the justice of the peace read their vows, until Alana had to pick him up out of her Aunt's arms and hold him as she swore that she would love them, protect them, and do anything for them for as long as they live.

However trite, it was the wedding that solidified in Alana’s head that she would go along with Chilton’s incredibly dangerous and stupid plan. She knew that she would never, ever be safe from Hannibal Lecter if she had to constantly look over her shoulder, where every day the newspaper could contain the news of his inevitable escape with not enough lead time for them to survive his wrath, that she would never know where he was, what he was doing, and who he was conspiring with, unless she was in control of him. 

She sets up a meeting with her boss and steers the conversation to his retirement, and when he offers to make her his successor she accepts it on the spot, throwing her into playing her part in Chilton's grand plan. At the same time, she enrols Daniel in preschool, buys Margot a gun and starts planning their escape. By the time she is done, she is dizzy from the amount of money she has spent. There’s a helicopter on retainer to take them to one of the seven properties she has purchased, cash, under assumed names, to be decided on the day. They have real passports and fake passports, they have contingencies to hide Daniel, to change their faces, to never see any of their loved ones again.

  
The day that Hannibal Lecter is released into her care she smiles at him with shark teeth of her own, a queen ascendent, ready for anything.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still working through all my Margana feels, honestly I love the possibilities of their relationship and despair just how little we have to go on.  
> The Hannibal Wiki says that their son's name is Morgan, but as there's no citations for it and honestly I can't imagine Margot giving her son a name that is so close to how she and her brother are named I decided to name him something else. Daniel means 'God is my Judge', which I think Alana would resonate with, Joshua because he was born on Christmas day, and Xochipilli because once I found it I couldn't resist. 
> 
> This can be seen as a continuation of my previous Margana fic, [Après moi, le déluge](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4313322) but obviously it stands alone. The title is the french equivalent of 'it never rains but it pours', literally 'never two without three'.


End file.
